I interviewed Duchampiana director Lilian Hess at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here is their artist statement:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at different immersive stories from Venice Immersive 2024, Today's episode is about Duchampiana, which is a part of the Venice College Biennale. And it's sort of a combination of a embodied exploration with a lot of feminist intentions in terms of trying to get you to focus in on your body and focus on your own immersive embodied experience. And it's got this integration with stair climbing technologies where it's detecting as you're walking up the stairs, And then having you go up with this infinite staircase and have this kind of interactions and encounters with these different models that are based upon this famous Duchamp painting that was at the very early beginnings of film. And so it's kind of taking that painting and then reimagining it as a way that you're kind of embodying it and actually living into that painting. It's also worth mentioning that there's a whole compendium essay that came around this titled Ascend to Become by the director Lillian Hess. And so there's a lot of other deeper thought that was going on behind this piece as well that digs into a lot more of the additional context around the intentions and motivations behind the piece. So that's it for coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Lillian happened on Sunday, September 1st, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:40.632] Lilian Hess: My name is Lillian Hess. I'm a visual artist and filmmaker. I've worked in the realm of immersive media for six years. And at this year's Venice Film Festival, I'm presenting my first very own directed piece, Duchampiano.
[00:01:56.096] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:00.570] Lilian Hess: I'm trained as a documentary filmmaker and I studied literature as well. I'm really interested in generally in the theme of the body, the space and movement within the space, which is why I think I moved from film to immersive media because the body can be actively participating in storytelling. I'm particularly interested, therefore, also in installation-based work.
[00:02:25.117] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give a bit more context for how XR came onto your radar based upon what you were doing before.
[00:02:32.624] Lilian Hess: My first XR piece that I worked on was Cosmos Within Us, which was directed by Tupac Martyr. I produced that work and we presented it here in Venice in 2019. And I think that was really what got me really excited about VR because we worked with... live actors, live orchestra, live dancers who were distributing scent around the room. So it was really this kind of multi-sensory experience and that is, yeah, what continues to fascinate me about VR location-based experiences is that possibility to bring more senses into the experience beyond sound and visual. I'm still really interested in film and I continue making documentary films but I like to combine these mediums or have for instance accompanying quote-unquote flat works to immersive works and also have written material to kind of create wider contexts around the themes that I like to discuss.
[00:03:35.083] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could give a bit more context for the project that you're showing here and how that came about.
[00:03:41.033] Lilian Hess: So Duchampiana is a piece that talks about freedom of movement and what it means to move freely. The idea came about actually quite a long time ago in 2016 I was doing a summer residency at the National Film and Television School in London and I was interested in kind of looking at stairs as a non-space but also as a poetic space and looking at it through a feminist lens and I had interviewed various different people and created a short film around this topic of movement on the stairs and kind of movement the politics of movement but the story didn't feel like it was coming through to the audience and so I eventually learned once I started working in VR because I felt Yeah, it needed the actual participation and the actual movement of the audience to drive the story. And so when three years later I started working with Tupac Martí on Cosmos Within Us and I got introduced to the medium of VR, that idea kind of came back to me and I thought, oh, wouldn't it be interesting to rather than telling stories of people and about movement to actually tell a story through movement?
[00:05:01.069] Kent Bye: Yeah, when you say through a feminist lens, are there any feminist scholars that you're leaning upon and what kind of insights you're drawing from them?
[00:05:06.755] Lilian Hess: I have to think about that for a moment. So I've written a contextualizing essay that goes along with this experience to Champiana, and there's a lot of different reading I'm doing or I have done on the topic, probably most specifically around body movement, body image and what it means to be looking at images and be kind of taking an impression from those and then move according to those. I've been looking maybe at other artists work like Penny Lane, who is a documentary filmmaker who made a piece called Normal Appearances, which is this kind of super cut of many, many, many different scenes from this reality TV show called Bachelor Nation and of all these women who are kind of watching themselves being watched, moving according to certain, I guess, quote unquote, feminine ideals. And that kind of work has got me interested in movement according to social constructs. There is one scholar that I'm looking at. Her name is Rebecca Coleman. I've already read her work while I was studying at Goldsmiths. I was studying kind of dual bachelor called media and monoliterature which looked very much at gender studies, sociology, like visual anthropology and she was actually writing her dissertation at Goldsmiths and her work looks specifically at how young women specifically are impressionable through images but she questions whether it's as easy as image A impresses body A or whether it's more this kind of in-between relation between the image and the body that is a continuously moving and morphing relationship that can also be I guess redirected kind of looking at the body more as an algorithm that takes in data. And what if we change that data and how does the body then change? But what specifically struck me in my research around movement in the body was a study by Amy Cuddy, which she did in 2012. where she found, so she's a behavioral scientist, where she found that movement doesn't just give other people an impression of you, but it also gives yourself an impression of you, and how certain ways of movement, she looks specifically at contractive, so quote-unquote power poses, and more kind of poses where you make yourself small, so low power poses, she calls those, And she found how depending on which pose you hold for a certain amount of time, it actually changes your hormone levels and makes you either more stressed or more calm. So, yeah, going from this like long side argument, basically what I'm arriving at or trying to arrive at with Duchampiana is this argument that through movement we can change not just social structures, but also our own well-being and our own participation and presence in the world.
[00:08:09.813] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And, you know, I feel like there's, there's certainly a lot of references that you have in this essay that you had. And I noticed that in a Brzezinska had suggested that you write it. Maybe you could give a little bit more context for how that came about in terms of her giving you that recommendation of kind of expanding out. Cause there's a lot of ideas that you have behind it, but. aren't necessarily contained within the experience itself and so there's kind of a contrast between the written language and the written essay as a form of communication versus the more embodied interaction that would totally change the vibe of the experience if you start to you know cite all the feminist literature and scholars within the context of experience so i can understand the need to have something separate but i'm just curious hear a little bit more about the development or inspiration for this essay
[00:08:54.142] Lilian Hess: so i love academia and i love reading a lot of yeah material around the works that i create without necessarily wanting to put all that into the work because i think ultimately an audio visual in this case also physical medium should be more experiential and free from me giving the audience like all of these references all of these ideas that I'm having while I created this particular work Duchampiana is so minimalist it is a journey up an infinite staircase and it's this one metaphor that I'm trying to make of we're looking at the nude descending the staircase which is the painting I departed from by Marcel Duchamp and turning that around into a climb so just a simple change in direction change in movement change in Do I move according to how this figure has been painted or do I move because I want to move in the way that I want? And I felt it could be interesting or it was also mostly for me to kind of put all my research down into a compendium, which is this essay. But what I find really beautiful is so when I invite people into the space, I don't really give them much direction before watching the piece. At the most, I will say it is a piece about body movement, about the freedom of movement. And I think the beautiful thing is that a lot of people take away very different things from the piece. because the staircase has such strong symbolism, climbing has such a strong symbolism just in itself that some people think about Sisyphus, some people think about it being kind of a stairway to heaven, just an aspirational piece. I've had one visitor read it as a piece about the colonialization of the body and how climbing and leaving this group of figures behind was like ridding yourself from your burdens. Yeah, so there's many different interpretations and I think that's really beautiful that people have their own thoughts about the piece.
[00:10:56.451] Kent Bye: Yeah, it is very abstract and sparse when it comes to the diegetic elements that are giving context for what's happening. It's very much a much more embodied interaction, and you're having these other characters that are kind of following you and mimicking you. But yeah, maybe it's worth going back to the image that inspired the context and scene, because in your description video about this piece, that seemed to be the launching off point. So maybe you could just give a little bit more context as to this painting and what it was about and why you were drawn to it to invert it in a way.
[00:11:26.181] Lilian Hess: Absolutely. So the painting or this artwork that I departed from for Duchampiana was a painting by Marcel Duchamp which he painted at the beginning of the 20th century called Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and it shows a body in motion from profile view and it looks like he painted many many many many bodies walking down the stairs but it was meant to be one body shown in motion and this was at the time of when film was starting to be created, moving image was starting to be created and it kind of was not well received at the time because it abstracted the body, it showed a genderless body, it showed a body kind of split into many parts which was just very unusual at the time. The motif itself though of the nude descending the staircase is a very common motif, which has been repeated throughout art history many, many, many times. Again, through film, if we think of Sunset Boulevard, if we think of She's All That, I mean, any high school movie will show you the pretty girl coming down the stairs. or older films like Descending the Stairs in Despair. And it's this very popular display pose for the female body. And so what I found interesting is turning this movement around, kind of a comment on turning around the way of how the female body has been portrayed, how the female body has to quote-unquote move, while at the same time departing from an image that Yes, uses this motif, repeats this motif, but in a very, at its time, groundbreaking way. And yeah, it was very much a point of departure for the design of the figures. So the figures in the piece are very much leaning on Duchamp's painting in their aesthetic.
[00:13:16.713] Kent Bye: Okay. So it sounds like it's a painting that kind of represents the beginning of the film at the time, the moving image. And then you're taking that image and having a new perspective where you're embodying that character and also having the mirrors of this character around you. They're not mimicking your movement. They seem to be more like autonomous NPCs. And if anything, they are stopping when you stop or they disappear when you stop. And so there's And I guess it's worth mentioning that you're on a mobile stair that you're actually walking through stairs as you're going through this piece, which is probably the defining character of this piece, at least from my memory of the piece. Such an embodied and active piece where you're actually walking up the stairs and then walking up these virtual stairs. But in terms of the symbolism of this motif of these characters, Is the idea that it's sort of alluding to, like, just like it's a painting that was controversial at the time for the beginning of cinema, that you wanted to re-look at this as the beginning of this new type of immersive media and then start to continue to these questions around body, body image and gender and also, like, what's it mean to be embodied and moving within the piece of art?
[00:14:27.011] Lilian Hess: I think that's definitely one part of it is bringing an art piece that was attempting to bring a body into movement on a flat surface then into a three-dimensional space and make it actually move. That's definitely part of why I chose the painting because at its time it was revolutionary and now we're at a time where we're exploring this new medium of virtual reality or immersive media. and to kind of look at these two moments in time and evolve or like take the next step with this piece. It's worth mentioning also that as a side note that this particular painting has been explored already by a Japanese sculpture and it's a piece that's actually at the MoMA in New York and she created a wooden stair sculpture and integrated screens into it. So it's already been brought onto the screen and to an actual moving body and now it's like a third step with bringing it into a three-dimensional space. So it's kind of an interesting painting I think that has had many iterations after its first iteration. But yeah, in the piece itself, also, if we're in a three-dimensional space, so you don't embody the figure that has been painted, but you walk with her, so you are put more in the position of an ally and later in the position of Then going on your own journey and having to create essentially your own way by keep moving up the staircase which then materializes in front of you the further you go. So it's less I guess an embodiment of the figure as adjoining the figure on her journey and then making it your own.
[00:16:05.296] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And so I guess we take a step back and as you're starting to develop this project, you have the actual VR experience part of it. You have the integration with the stepping stairs that are, there was a part of me that as I was doing it, I was like, am I safe? I was told and instructed, okay, if you stop me, it will stop. But there was some moments that I was like, ah, it's going a little bit further than I'd want it to right now. like the fear that it was going to do something I didn't expect or I was going to fall and land on my face. There's a kind of an existential fear of like my own safety as I was doing this experience, like just to make sure that, okay, I trust the technology, but I'm the very first person to be doing this right now in this festival. And I just, yeah, there was a little bit of a fear that was there that was, I guess, higher stakes than most VR experiences that I've done, where there was some physical exercise equipment that could potentially go wrong. But all that aside, I guess the question is around the development of the project, because there is this tight integration between this peripheral that is a key part of the narrative. And so where did you begin to even see that this might be possible?
[00:17:11.303] Lilian Hess: So it's definitely an absolutely experimental piece and no one's ever tried to create like an AI tracking system integrated into a stair climber which then communicates with Unreal and vice versa so and there's definitely still a few things that need to be ironed out. The journey in making this piece was interesting because for the longest time people definitely discouraged me from using a stair glider as an interactive device. But it just felt so essential to the story that I wanted to stick with that idea and we took quite some time, the production and I, to find the right people to to be hacking the hardware and to create this custom AI tracking system. We worked with a company in Germany called Immersive, who are specialized in body tracking through camera systems. And yeah, we arrived at a space where it's really, really quite reliable. We always still stand by in case of emergency, as you just mentioned, just to be sure that everything is as it should be. But we've been quite pleased with how well it runs and how safe ultimately people do feel. I thought a lot more people would see it and be intrigued, but then maybe be like, oh, I'm not sure I'm up for this to be blind on a moving staircase. But it's been a positive surprise how many people are intrigued and then actually want to do it and then even when sometimes there's little hiccups manage to iron them out themselves by just keeping going but yeah the integration of the stairs was for me quite important for the story and it seems the audience feels the same way so I'm glad we stuck it out and found a solution for that.
[00:18:55.640] Kent Bye: Well, your project was a part of the College Biennale Immersive Cinema program, so you had a chance to workshop it with mentors. I'm just trying to get a sense of the development of the project for what you had ready going into the College Biennale, then it continued to be developed, and now you're showing it here. at Venice Immersive 2024. So I'm just trying to get a sense of where you were at with the project, what you had as you were going in, if you already had it all integrated or if it's something that you were still working on when you were going through the mentorship program. So yeah.
[00:19:27.719] Lilian Hess: When I arrived at the Biennale College with the piece it was very much a script and a mood board so there was no anything nothing visual in the headset anything to see and it was really helpful to be at the college at that stage because there were still some quite crucial changes in the script that I feel like made the work a lot stronger. Duchampiana in the beginning wasn't gonna be a body we were gonna be alone on the staircase and really the whole element of the figures and the crowd forming around us came through that workshop, which really is now so key for your own experience of the piece and for this kind of crescendo up the staircase. After the college, my producer Sarah Arnault from France, Chicky Boom, continued together to find the funding for the piece. So we first got funding from the CNC. We then joined with Mindstorm Productions in Germany and received further funding from bavarian film fund and the median board berlin and as these fundings came in we went through several prototype iterations what took the longest was definitely workshopping the stair climber and getting that interaction to be smooth and also making sure that the stairs we had so many iterations of the sizing of the stairs and like the height of the camera of the users kind of position within the piece to make sure you feel grounded enough and feel like you're actually walking on the staircase that you see and that the feeling you have of the staircase you walk on kind of correlates enough to give a good feeling. So that was the biggest part. We then created our sort of final prototype which we showcased at the IFFR Dark Room at the beginning of 2024. that had already integrated the motion capture which we recorded with dancer Chihiro Kawasaki. I'd worked with her in the past and it was really crucial to use motion capture as opposed to keyframe animation because the figures are somewhat otherworldly and they needed to have like an organic feel to them to not feel robotic or too estranged for our own comfort I guess as viewers. And that was a really great process because walking stairs is such a mundane movement and to work with a dancer who can obviously give like such a mundane movement so many different feelings and emotions and iterations as well was fascinating. And at IFFR then we were super happy to be awarded the Eurimage New Lab Award, which was the first time that it was given to an immersive project. We were in competition or nominated for the same award along with other actual films that were really, really beautiful films as well. And I was entirely sure that it was going to go to a film because it was an audience outreach award and VR historically is very hard to get to an audience. with only one person in the headset at a time. But yeah, apparently they saw something in the piece which was exciting to be recognized in that way and that helped us to then create the final installation as it is here now.
[00:22:40.341] Kent Bye: Okay, and is this the final installation or is there more work to be done that you're going to do after this to kind of expand it or to add anything else than what's being shown here?
[00:22:49.238] Lilian Hess: So what is seen inside the headset is in its final form. What we do want to tweak a bit further is the interaction system to be able to actually showcase it in, well, what would be my goal and my hope is to have this as an installation in a museum or a gallery in the art space. But to get to that step, we definitely still need to tweak some little bits to make it reliable and to make it available and manageable by a team at an art space.
[00:23:19.878] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah, and I feel like I'll start to dive into a little bit of my experience of the piece and questions around it. Because as I did the piece, there's a lot of symbolism or abstractions. There's not a lot of explanation as to what's happening and what things are. There's a lot of interpretation I am being asked to do to kind of make sense of what's happening and why. so i get onto the stairs and then i see a really long staircase and i'm like okay this is really long and i'm walking for a while and i'm like it doesn't look like i'm getting anywhere near the end i have no idea how long this is going to be and then this very abstract looking avatar is walking next to me whenever i stop they also stop and then at some point there's like like a cohort of these bodies that are walking behind all of us and And then when I stop, then all of those bodies disappear. And then I look to this other buddy that's walking along with me. He's always persistently there, never goes away. And also when I look down, it sort of changed. Like, I didn't see where I started from. I almost wanted to see how far have I gone Like, how far am I progressing? Because I'm asking myself, okay, am I 10% done, 25% done, 50% or 75%? And so it put me in this kind of liminal space of like taking away the tether of how far I've gone, where it was an infinite staircase behind me and an infinite staircase ahead of me. And it was like, oh, dear. Like, where is this going? And then when I get to sort of like, I don't know if I don't think I ever there was never like a top or if I did get the top, it's just sort of it stopped when I stopped walking and it was decided that I was done. And so it just sort of ended in a way that in my mind, I was like, I'm going to get to the top of the mountain. I'm going to overlook and I'm going to see how far I've come and be like, there's going to be some sort of like exalted payoff of like, good job. You did it. Here's the reward by looking at this beautiful view of like usually what you get when you climb a mountain. And so that was what was in my mind. And that when it didn't happen, it was like, okay, I don't quite understand how I was reading this because you're climbing a stairs, but the stairs are kind of like in a void space. There's not a lot of other markers to mark like what's happening. And so it just feels like an infinite staircase in the void that I'm walking on. And like the Sisyphus is a good, I didn't think of at the time, but it feels like an apt metaphor because it does feel a little Sisyphusian to be asked to walk on an infinite staircase and then, Yeah. So anyway, that was sort of my experience. And I kind of left not knowing all this stuff. And then I was handed a very detailed essay. I haven't had a chance to read through all of it. So there's a part of me that's wondering, OK, I'm wondering if I get to the end of this, if I'm going to understand it more or if and if that's the case, then is there a way to include some more of what's in this booklet into the experience itself so that by the end of it, I'm not left with kind of wondering what that was all about. So that was sort of my my trip report for the piece.
[00:26:19.522] Lilian Hess: Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's really interesting. It's definitely a piece which frustrates some people because there is no quote-unquote payoff or ice cream at the top of the mountain. It just doesn't happen. I guess what I hope and my choice to create the piece in this way and to not give people a lot more explanation around it before they go into it and to give an essay after which they can read or they can't they don't have to it's it's more a compendium of thoughts of mine that go with it what i'm hoping to achieve i guess is and which from speaking to other audience members i have achieved with quite a few is that the frustration eventually turns into if there is any frustration to begin with into trying to find well a Is it about getting somewhere or is it about just the movement itself and the space and the community that I'm walking with? So it's definitely not a piece that will satisfy in the same way a traditional three-act or five-act narrative will. meant to be more a space to visit and to be I guess exposed or to be active in your own body and to think about well whatever it is you want to take away from it.
[00:27:42.265] Kent Bye: It's interesting that there's this, I guess, two modes of being in this experience, which is like, I want to get to the end versus like, I'm here in the moment. As I'm going through different interactive experiences, I'm like looking for clues for an invitation to enter into one of those different modes. Yeah. I guess I, it was the very first experience of my day. I was starting to like, I have to get through all these experiences in the course. I have to get through four and a half hours of experiences in six hours. That was like my mindset at the time. So I guess I was a little bit more of like, okay, I've got to get through this, which is, you know, there's another experience called Garden Alchemy where I was sort of going back and forth and was told ahead of time, look, this isn't very much a contemplative piece. If you're coming into this thinking about getting into your next piece, then you're going to kind of miss the point. So that's kind of the risk that I take with trying to speed run through everything and see as much as I can that I'm going to potentially miss the point if the point of the piece is to really be present in the moment. So I guess as I was trying to figure it out, I was confused. It was like, in part of that confusion, if that's part of the design, then that's achieved. But with the ambiguity of trying to discern, I guess when there's a symbolic logic of communication where there's not a lot of language, not a lot of explanation, then you're kind of leaving the audience to figure it out. And if there is this kind of invitation to be mindful or pay attention to my body, then are there any things in the experiential design that you can invite me to sort of get into that state rather than to just think about, oh, I'm frustrated and I haven't gotten to the end. And maybe there's a voiceover that says, oh, you're thinking about the end. Well, there's an opportunity to shift into a different mode that I didn't inherently figure out what to go into that in that moment. So I guess it's a question of like, how open-ended you want it to be. And if the point is to be in the more contemplative space, then what is it in the design that could invite me into that space without me having to figure out something that I just didn't figure out?
[00:29:48.991] Lilian Hess: Yeah, I think, for me, this lies more in the onboarding, which is why I also switched at some point to speak more, say something like, this is an experience about body movement. You can focus on your body and think about that while you're inside the piece. So even just that little sentence, I feel, puts people in a slightly different space to begin with.
[00:30:13.736] Kent Bye: Did you tell about Tamika? I don't know if I remember. It's so long ago.
[00:30:18.337] Lilian Hess: I did not, no. This is something that came about after having a few guests and a few guests that really enjoyed it, but said, oh, it would have been nice to kind of just have a little bit of an inkling because arriving without maybe even having read anything about the piece, just to know, OK, I'm getting into a more contemplative space. So I did start doing that. But to introduce anything like Voice or explanation inside the piece just for me isn't what I would want to do. It just feels too on the nose and from the audience that I've had so far I do feel there is an audience that enjoys this kind of work that is just very abstract without necessarily much explanation. I'm gonna just mention a work that for me I had a similar experience with but then in sort of retrospect really loved it was Eurydice by Celine Diamond which showed in Venice a couple of years ago which was going down the stairs into hell and then coming back up for the entirety of the piece while walking. And I was so frustrated after that piece of work. And then I thought about it for a few more hours and talked to a few people about it. And then I came to really love it. And I think that work definitely also kind of encouraged me to stick with this very abstract place of not necessarily any explanation or language in it, but to just go on the journey and be in that space.
[00:31:54.298] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it's sort of subtitled or mentioned like a descent into hell or something. It's got this infinite recursion. Yeah, I really enjoyed the embodied interactions, but there were some times where I was getting frustrated with that as well. So I guess what that makes me think of in some ways is that part of the experiential design in developing this new language is these are pieces of art that are able to communicate different things and so the goal is that you have an artistic intention and expression you're trying to do and someone experience it and hopefully there's going to be some transmission of that intention And if there's too much of a gap, there's either that experience is just not meant for some people, or sometimes there's a matter of experiential design. There's something you can do from a design perspective, either on the onboarding or within the context of the experience itself, to be able to kind of close and minimize that gap. So I guess that's some of my takeaways. So I guess to kind of frame it as a question, what is the artistic intent for what type of things that you want people to take away from this experience?
[00:32:59.560] Lilian Hess: I think I want to provide a space that is why the choice of stairs and the choice of movement that is already holding a lot of symbolism inside it. So there is many opportunities for people to respond to it in different ways and to maybe connect it in different ways with their own lives, experience, thoughts. for me it is a inherently feminist piece and interestingly the female visitors see that maybe more than male visitors do which doesn't matter everyone can take away whatever they want from it but i guess if we're talking about to what extent this my i guess message or artistic intent transpire It seems to be understood a lot more by female visitors without it necessarily being a piece that is made just for female visitors. But that's just what I've learned in the past five days, let's say, from conversations that I've had with connotations from like breaking through the glass ceiling. climbing together to the top like anything that is maybe more of a mainstream feminist kind of body of thought but to something more nuanced as we're speaking here about the colonialized body. So it's really interesting the different interpretations I get but they I feel all very much have aligned with my intent I guess. But yeah, again, it is such an interpretable space and all I'm trying really is to offer a space to think about the body and body movement. And that seems to have worked for the most part.
[00:34:43.229] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wonder when I finished reading through the essay, I didn't have the chance to read through it all yet. I've just been kind of slammed for doing all these interviews and participating in the conference itself and talking to people. yeah just to see if there's other sort of insights because you're obviously thinking very deeply around the intention of everything within the experience and uh yeah in terms of the the sound design is there any i'm trying to remember it seemed to be more ambient sounds and maybe clicking of stairs i don't remember any specific other things but sound is sound is the one thing that's often like the thing that's the most invisible for my memory as i'm going through an experience but i'm wondering What kind of sound design you had in this piece in order to help augment the whole experience of everything?
[00:35:28.864] Lilian Hess: The sound design was really important here because there's not much you can engage with, right? There's the staircase, there is the sky in which the staircase is suspended, which changes as you go up. and there's the figures and so sound had to be really textured and layered and I worked with the sound designer Fritz Rating in Berlin who decided to create all the sounds by hand so it was all foley sound created with materials like wood, metal and every single footstep on the stairs is slightly different which while I guess no one will like listen to the footsteps one by one compare them to each other and figure out if they're different but It overall creates an atmosphere of a more layered and more multiplied experience of the bodies that are around you. They're really only ten figures but through the sound it feels like it's a much bigger crowd and it also the kind of organic nature of the sounds and how they were created gives the figures I think a much more sympathetic feel than maybe it would have for instance steps that would have been multiplied and repeated. There is one decision that came quite late was to introduce voices not in terms of language but in terms of emitting like these kind of sing-song sounds as the crowd emerges and multiplies. and to arrive at this one chord at the end to hum in kind of unison before you then get released back into reality I guess into this reality which compared to thoughts that I had before I think really gave the group a much more communal feel which in my eyes really adds a lot to the yeah just to how you feel while you walk on the stairs
[00:37:25.802] Kent Bye: Yeah. One other thing that's happening is that, you know, you're walking and then you're walking with another entity and then there's like even more behind you. And then when you stop, sometimes they all go the way. But I couldn't necessarily understand the logic as to why they were disappearing. Is there any thing you would like to elaborate or expand upon, like the symbolism of them disappearing when I stopped?
[00:37:48.777] Lilian Hess: Sure. The idea behind why the crowd disappears when you pause and you're left with sort of the original character that you started with, which is Duchampiana, is that all these other figures have kind of materialized out of her body and they're more almost like supporting spirits on the way, while the real journey is yours and hers. you choose to pause it is and she also stops in her tracks it's kind of you alone on the staircase and you can well you can look around but it's also kind of a moment of suspension a moment of rest that is yours and then when you continue you're joined again by the crowd you walk with so the intention is kind of to give it a feeling of yeah room to breathe
[00:38:37.202] Kent Bye: Yeah, I didn't know what to make of it other than I was kind of leading the pack so I felt like I was like the leader in some way and I'm wondering if like if I was in the middle of these other bodies if I would have felt like more a part of the group because I felt like kind of separated from the group and then or if I was at the end that would give another feeling so I don't know if you've thought about or experimented like at what position you are with these other bodies that are walking and how that might change the experience of it.
[00:39:04.338] Lilian Hess: yeah absolutely you start out in the middle of them so they materialize in front and behind and next to you and as you sort of move up the staircase you are moving more and more in front of the crowd and then eventually they stop it's the end of their journey and they release you to your own which is also when the stairs in front of you only materialize if you do keep going so there is no staircase without you moving forward anymore to kind of yeah make a point about you make your own path if you choose to do so
[00:39:38.726] Kent Bye: Okay. And I was unclear as to when things were ending and I stopped, then it stopped, but it felt like it was in reaction to when I stopped. And I was like, there's a part of me that wants to see everything and also just kind of make sure that it wasn't a bug or anything like that. And then when I asked afterwards, you said, no, it's because you stopped. And when you come to a stop, it also made me think, well, what happens if people just don't stop? Then if they just keep walking, have you come across that? Or what do you do when people just keep going with the infinite staircase?
[00:40:05.879] Lilian Hess: So because it's a festival and we have time slots we do have to end with the credits at some point so we give a significant amount of time or significant amount of time like two minutes that people can still keep going if they choose to and then we do fade to black because we have to end the experience at some point but my dream would have been to just never end it and people just stop when they want to stop.
[00:40:30.297] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. I don't know what I think about that because I feel like I kind of want to have a clear ending and in a way that, yeah, I know that maybe that's just my personal preference and my completionist nature to like know that I've completed and I've checked it off or, but yeah, I guess it's just my personal preference as well. As you say, there's a lot of feminist inspirations for trying to go against that kind of like mindset that you want to get to the top or want to succeed or get a reward at the end. And so, yeah, I don't know if you have any other comments.
[00:41:00.444] Lilian Hess: Yeah, I think this is definitely the world is split and people who will like this experience and people who won't or get really frustrated with it, which is I'm totally open to that and obviously expected that as well with the choice of making something that is entirely without language, entirely without a traditional narrative and completely open-ended. There is no reward at the end I'm afraid. The reward I guess is having spent time in a space that is calm, that is meditative to an extent but also if you do the interactive version very much makes you very aware of your body because it is challenging. Also to keep walking up stairs. I think it is about 220 in total in this length of the experience and Yeah, yeah, well, I don't know what else I think I get something out of every experience that I do and I also get everything out of all the interviews and conversations that I do and I think there'll be even more stuff that I get out of this experience from reading through the essay and I think it's this
[00:42:05.667] Kent Bye: multi-modal approach that there's an experience and then different design intentions and also you know reading through a little bit more of the backstory and the context to be able to get even more context so producing this podcast I'll be digging into it more so I'll be thinking about it a lot more after this so yeah I guess as we start to wrap up I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of this type of immersive media might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:42:30.339] Lilian Hess: As I said at the beginning, I'm really interested in location-based pieces that include the body, and I guess I have an inclination to very political works, but that don't necessarily have to be politically received. What I love to create in this medium, moving entirely away from maybe its original purpose of being more game based, more interaction based in terms of doing things in the scene that isn't just walking stairs like in this case is to create spaces that I guess allow for different kinds of movement and different kinds of existing in space than maybe our real world does.
[00:43:15.037] Kent Bye: I have to ask after you've got this like system where you have stairs and integrated with the VR technology, is there any sort of like gamified fitness things that you're interested in doing? Or are you more interested in continuing on exploring other kind of explorations of the body and other kind of more artistic explorations?
[00:43:34.451] Lilian Hess: I think more the latter, although distribution-wise we definitely have thought about placing this piece in fitness studios or places for exercise as an alternative way of doing a workout that is very artistic.
[00:43:53.528] Kent Bye: Yeah, for sure. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:43:58.453] Lilian Hess: It's been a real beautiful experience. This is my first work as a director to present in an immersive festival and what I've loved about this community for the six years that I've been working in this space is that there's so much support and so much open communication and fantastic feedback and yeah that it's just been a real pleasure to show this and to also get a feeling that people really do openly share what they think and feel about the piece. and there hasn't been anyone coming in and then just walking out again because they hated it or anything. But even if people didn't really enjoy it maybe or got frustrated with it, there's always been really interesting conversations and feedback that was really valuable to me.
[00:44:44.628] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I also feel like as the medium develops, there's a sort of a dream logic or symbolic logic that people are going to be using in the medium that you're using in this piece, but also people become fluid in speaking and receiving that symbolic logic. So I feel like there's a bit of understanding the language and grammar of those symbols that, yeah, as time goes on, it'll start to get very interesting to see how people can create more and more of these experiences that feel like dreams that are allowing to have the messages come through in a way that, still allows for that interpretation of a dream that is never really ever clear anyway trying to figure out what those dreams mean so yeah like the more people that do that type of depth psychological work and understand how to pay attention to what's happening in their lives and listen to their dreams and so yeah i feel like this is kind of like a sign of new modes of understanding and communicating and yeah integrations with the technology as well and i Yeah, very interesting to see all these things come together. And I really enjoyed having this conversation to help unpack it a little bit more and get a little bit more context and how it came about. And yeah, just kind of reflecting on all the different components of it. So yeah, thanks again, Lillian, for joining me today on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:45:54.399] Lilian Hess: Thanks, Kent. Yeah, it was a great conversation also to hear what you thought and took away from the work.
[00:45:59.997] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
